Kumulus Technologies

2018 Vancouver OpenStack Summit – Its Not Just About OpenStack Anymore

If you’ve had a feeling that OpenStack was possibly not the star of its own show anymore, comparatively lackluster attendance, snarky tweets and a plethora of container-related talks may have confirmed it for you at this May’s Vancouver OpenStack summit. This disturbance in the force is perhaps tellingly reflected in the OpenStack Foundation’s shifting gears to embrace open infrastructure more generally and their new model of managing projects like Kata Containers and Zuul CI/CD outside of the OpenStack tent. OpenStack still has a solid role in cloud systems- it has achieved maturity, excels as an (the) opensource IaaS, and is used extensively in production by major corporations. Still, it would be unwise to ignore all the other cloud technologies that provide function and flexibility to cloud users and operators. While there were certainly many presentations on OpenStack alone at the summit, the question that community has been asking, and trying to address, is how does OpenStack fit into a new world of cloud-native container technologies that have exploded to dominance (and taken the share of the hype) outside of OpenStack’s initial model of how cloud infrastructure should work.

Our CTO, Robert Starmer, attended the summit and was a participant on two panels looking at the new world order of cloud-native that OpenStack is now navigating. One panel squarely addressed the issue of Kubernetes, the leading container orchestration tool, and how it meshes with other open infrastructure tools, like OpenStack. His second panel appearance looked at the current state of concerns about container security, possibly the one issue that continues to dog the container model compared to VM-based cloud-deployments.

Kubernetes and your Open Infrastructure

Engineering Container Security Addressing the Unique Security Challenges of Containers at Scale in a Multi-Cloud World